Investigation needed for lottery card irregularities, say TDs
An independent investigation and new laws to regulate lottery games are being sought in the wake of the controversy surrounding €180,000 in missing prizes.
Tánaiste Simon Coveney said the Government was open to the idea of an inquiry and it was “not acceptable” that human error was to blame for four prizes being left out of three of the scratch card games.
Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty pressed for the lottery regulator to appoint an investigator, saying: “It is very hard to believe that three games operated by Premier Lotteries Ireland had four jackpot prizes missing and that this was due to human error or some improbable misfortune.
“The probability that out of all the prizes four jackpot prizes across three games would be missing, involves a lot of zeros. The probability is one in 25 million billion.
“A private operator, however, that deals in odds every day, managed to leave out the four top prizes, against astronomical odds.
"The legislation around this is completely flawed. This private operator writes its own code of conduct and sends it to the regulator for approval.”
Mr Coveney conceded that answers were needed.
At a minimum, the regulator and the operator should come before an Oireachtas committee to explain what has happened.
“I am certainly not against the idea of an independent investigation with regard to how this could have happened.
"The integrity of the lottery system is hugely important given how valuable it is to the many good causes it funds.”
He said the Government has an open mind around getting to the bottom of what happened.
“I do not believe it is acceptable to simply dismiss this as human error at some point in the management chain,” he said.
“The Government however, needs to have a fuller understanding of the appropriate course of action to get to the detail of what went wrong to ensure the public can have full confidence in the lottery system that so many people play on a daily and weekly basis.”
Mr Doherty and Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath also believe that there is a serious issue with the regulator.
“When she appeared before an Oireachtas committee in 2018 the regulator told us that the regulator of the National Lottery has access to all the systems and all of the real-time data,” said Mr Doherty.
“And still the regulator did not uncover this issue. There is a serious question around the role of the regulator when punters have been scammed to a level such as this."
